As some or all of you know I develop websites for a living and recently one of my customers had some problems with their e-mail. Missing e-mails, small storage space, and a slow web-based interface where the big problems. Usually if you host a website on a Web server you also host the e-mail on the same server but it is possible to host the e-mail and websites on separate servers. I had recently seen an article on how to host your domain e-mail on Google’s e-mail service Gmail so I decided to check out if it was worthwhile.

Here is what I had to do to get it going:

Go to the Google API page, sign in with my Google account, set up my domain, upload a small file to the root folder of my website so that Google could verify I have control of the website, wait for approximately 48 hours, set up my e-mail accounts in the meantime (I set up three different users under the same domain), now I am presently waiting on the domain ownership verification. Once that part is done I will be able to log into my web host where the actual website and current e-mail is being hosted and update my MX records. This will allow my website to continue to be hosted on my existing Web host while routing all e-mail to Google Gmail.

Nothing ever came in the e-mail regarding my domain verification so I went ahead and changed my MX records on my current web host. I then clicked on the “activate e-mail” link in my Google control panel and clicked on the “please check my MX record settings” button. It now says “we are checking your MX records; this may take up to 48 hours to complete” in my Google control panel under the e-mail settings. The next time that I checked the status it said that I had the MX record set incorrectly. The problem was that I did not have the MX records set in the right order. I deleted all of them and re-added them in the correct order and then clicked on the re-verify button in the Google control panel. This seemed to work because I was able to send and receive e-mails on the accounts that I set up. All new e-mails were being routed into Google’s Gmail interface.

Benefits of using Google Gmail for your company e-mail:

keep your website hosted wherever it is hosted.

Start using the Gmail e-mail interface to send and receive e-mails under your website domain. For example: Wesley@mywebsite.com.

I’m not sure if you get 2 GB per e-mail address or 2 GB for the domain shared among your difference e-mail users.

Everyone who is communicating with you have no idea that you’re using the Gmail interface.

Other bells and whistles that you can take advantage of:

Gmail has excellent spam protection.

E-mail messages are grouped by subject.

E-mail messages can be tagged.

Huge storage space.

Disadvantages:

Google shows text advertisements above or on the side of your e-mail messages. A computer reads your e-mails to search for keywords so that it can show relevant advertisements. Your reliance on Google increases.

Additional Advice :

You might want to set this up from the get go whenever you set up a new website to avoid any problems with e-mail migration. We were unable to import our old e-mail from our old e-mail box. I believe the import feature is available in the paid version.